Editorial | Obama's really, truly bad debate

Assuming anyone is buying the feeble spin that President Barack Obama's underwhelming debate performance was part of a master plan to minimize his coming across as confrontational or unpleasant, don't. He got pasted, and that's all there is to it. He barely registered a pulse.

The whys of his lackluster first audition for a second term will be examined for the foreseeable future, but this plain fact wouldn't be so nettlesome if the debate had been defined or framed by opponent Mitt Romney's principled stands or his longtime political philosophy. It wasn't, because Mr. Romney doesn't possess either; he's not likened to an Etch-a-Sketch for nothing. Simply put, the President stumbled and fumbled his way through an encounter Mr. Romney managed to own, despite his frequent gravitational pull toward fiction and away from fact.

The shape-shifting Republican - first he's a moderate, then he's staking out right-wing territory, now he's racing back to the center, or what passes for that these days, and changing former positions faster than quicksilver - pulled another fast one Wednesday night, in the first of three presidential debates over the next several weeks. The human chameleon was in full-blown new colors, saying what he thinks will work for this particular election, in plain sight of an American public that largely thinks he succeeded in besting President Obama on the domestic issues they discussed.

The people - including the Romney-disparaged "47 percent" - shouldn't be so easily fooled (didn't they watch the Republican debates that were Mr. Romney's baptism by fire and brimstone?) but Mr. Obama bears a lot of responsibility for that impression.

The President appeared to be a man who remembered his 20th wedding anniversary but forgot almost everything else: How to make clear points about complex issues. How to sell his own programs and trumpet his causes. How to call his opponent on some of the whoppers he told. How to explain that as far as the old bipartisan argument went, Mitch McConnell is no Tip O'Neill, and that today's Republicans are not like yesterday's. How to define himself, instead of letting his opponent do that for him. How to shake himself out of whatever somnambulant spell he was under, or shake off whatever misguided advice he may have been given on his debate comportment - he had to have been able to feel the flop sweat, as we in TV Land certainly did.

It didn't help that the debate had been oversold as something akin to a WWE match, or that its so-called moderator exhibited all the authority and temerity of Floyd the Barber (which is probably unfair to Floyd). But mitigating circumstances such as those can't stretch far enough to cover what was wrong with Mr. Obama's first debate. Mr. Romney outdid the incumbent, hands down, proving once again the truth behind one of the political maxims of Bill Clinton, the secretary of explaining stuff:

"When people are insecure, they'd rather have somebody who is strong and wrong than someone who's weak and right."

America saw that played out onstage in Denver Wednesday night.

Smart money says the Obama team, chastened by the instant polls and near universal pans of the President's first debate job, are already working on the "strong and right" combo for the next two debates. They had better be. Clock's ticking - for more than the candidates.

Louisville, Kentucky • Southern Indiana

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Editorial | Obama's really, truly bad debate

Assuming anyone is buying the feeble spin that President Barack Obama's underwhelming debate performance was part of a master plan to minimize his coming across as confrontational or unpleasant,